In Weather by Jenny Offill, Part 2 continues the narrative with Lizzie, the protagonist, as she grapples with her increasingly complex and anxious worldview. While reading part 2 I noticed many similarities between Lizzie and Lauren from Bulter’s novel, Parable of the Sower. Despite being in different settings and tones of their stories, both Lizzie and Lauren struggle to make sense of looming existential threats while trying to protect themselves and the people they care about, both Lizzie and Lauren are both preppers with that survivalist mentality and preparing for their looming danger. Both characters are also in caretaker positions, Lauren feels responsible for her family and community, and Lizzie feels the same for her husband, her son, and her brother Henry, which also extends to the people who write to Sylvia’s podcast.

The next chapter of this novel amplifies the amount of fear Lizzie feels causing her to strengthen her survivalist mentality. Lizzie delves more deeply into survivalist tips, fears of collapse, and the psychological impact of a world in crisis. Besides Lizzie’s anxieties and the current state of the world, she also has to take responsibility for her brother Henry. Their relationship to me consumes Lizzie’s life more than her husband and son. Their bond seems deep but complicated. Henry turns to Lizzie for help with his addiction, mental health, and dealing with becoming a father. “the due date is almost here and Henry is texting me every hour he is awake. I send him little things to distract him.” (Offill 97). She feels a persistent obligation to watch over him and help him find his footing, especially since he lacks a strong support network of his own. Lizzie also very noticeably feels obligated and trapped by Henry’s dependence, even though her love for him is genuine, her life becomes secondary to her sense of responsibility for Henry, she constantly sacrifices time and energy that could be directed to her family or self-care. When Lizzie tries to set limits and boundaries with Henry, it is hard for her, she keeps getting drawn back into whatever Henry needs rather than her own. Lizzie’s constant worry about climate change, her family’s future, and her son’s well-being make her relationship with Henry even more taxing. it’s very obvious that her caretaking role drains her emotionally and mentally, leaving little room for her mental health. Lizzie’s inability to fully step back from Henry’s issues, despite her need to protect her well-being, highlights her self-sacrificing nature. I hope as we continue to read Henry, he won’t rely only on Lizzie for comfort and he’ll begin to man up or grow up and take responsibility for his own life.

In Part Two, Offill explores the pervasive anxiety that comes with modern-day changes. Through Lizzie, Offill deepens the balance between personal responsibilities and global concerns, capturing Lizzie’s unease as she lives in a time when everything from the mundane to the catastrophic feels overwhelming, but then becomes normalized. Offill contrasts Lizzie’s personal worries with society’s looming crises and highlighting how we navigate—or attempt to ignore—the chaotic uncertainties of our world. Lizzie’s daily interactions with others unsheath her internal fears about societal collapse. For instance, her interaction with her family and neighbors subtly unveils her awareness of a world unraveling. When she observes her son, Eli, engrossed in videos about robots, she notes, “All Eli wants to do is watch videos about robots. But they are always a disappointment” ​(Offill 44.) Her sentiment echoes the failure of technological advancement to provide real solutions for the underlying fears about the future—a future in which humanity increasingly relies on technology but finds it emotionally lacking.

Offill frequently juxtaposes scenes of quiet domesticity with instances that underscore the helplessness many feel in the face of global crises. Lizzie’s relationship with her friend Sylvia, who has a podcast called Hell and High Water, where she provides a humorous yet bleak commentary on societal inaction. Sylvia often embarks on “going, going, gone” trips to see disappearing natural wonders. She, too, experiences this societal anxiety, asking, “How did we end up here?” (Offill 51.) as though in disbelief at the current state of the world​. Sylvia repeatedly attempts to experience these “last” glimpses of nature, hinting at the overwhelming and perhaps futile desire to connect with a world that seems to be slipping away. Offill’s narrative explores how we attempt to prepare for an uncertain future in small, often futile ways. We can see how Lizzie is fixated on survival tips— “Get organized or die” (Offil 45) is one such mantra she recalls—is both absurd and deeply relatable. It’s comforts hers enough, as these instructions only accentuate Lizzie’s awareness of her inability to control the future. She then decides to dole out advice on techniques for calming a fearful mind, showing how limited control anyone has in preparing for societal upheaval. It seems as if anything that she tries to plan or prepare goes to waste because it simply isn’t enough. 

Offill continues to use dark humor as a coping mechanism for Lizzie’s anxiety because humor often acts as a survival tool when things get complicated. When she gets home and walks in with a stack of bills, she places them down on the kitchen table once again and leaves them there, a thick stack just waiting for her to go through them, “What do you think will happen if you don’t open the bills? Do you think someone will come and take them away?” (Offill 45) The dialogue between Lizzie and Ben shows Lizzie’s approach to avoiding unpleasant tasks like handling bills – escaping and simply not doing them –. Her husband, Ben, sarcastically calls out the futility of her inaction, reflecting the theme of helplessness in the face of life’s unavoidable responsibilities. This humorous line also subtly emphasizes Lizzie’s immense existential dread—ignoring bills or climate change won’t make the problem disappear, but pretending otherwise provides a temporary sense of relief. A standout aspect of Offill’s prose in Weather is her use of fragmented narrative to mirror Lizzie’s overwhelming thoughts, which makes it easier to understand what she is thinking and how her anxiety works and builds up. Her internal dialogue rushes between mundane tasks and existential concerns, encapsulating the fragmented attention span of modern life, where we are bombarded with information from all directions. Lizzie reflects on these fragments of advice, trivia, and news snippets, to which Offill provides a window into how contemporary individuals must juggle personal lives with broader societal fears. This disjointed structure effectively conveys Lizzie’s struggle to reconcile her daily worries with the more significant crises she feels powerless to address, but it will be interesting to see how Lizzie’s fears and discomfort unfold as the story continues following the incoming environmental change. 

In part 2 of weather the ideas shared about Lizzies character from part 1 is now more emphasized and you can see the progression of how she thinks. We can see how she becomes more anxious about her life and the environment. Lizzies growing concerns of the climate change and these spiraling phases reflects on her personal life. Her mind is being continuously shifted from one thought to another creating a sense of insecurities she deals with as a mom, wife, librarian and the other roles she fulfills. Lizzies part time job with Sylvia requires her to travel with her attending lectures and responding to emails Sylvia gets from her podcast listeners.  These emails typically consists of people who spend most of their time fixated on the climate and how it is potentially collapsing.They are just waiting out the impending “doom” that is soon to reach their environment. I think Lizzie is turning into one of those people because as the novel continues to progress we can see her become more hopeless and little bit out of touch with herself and her relationships with other characters in the novel.

There are many moments where we see this hopelessness Lizzie has and to me it can be very concerning especially knowing that she has a child of her own. On page 73 Lizzie shares a moment she has with a student who tells her failure isn’t an option and Lizzies response is laughter. She then goes on to almost make light of the situation and says, “Hey, me too, I used to have plans! Biggish ones, medium at least”. This whole interaction to me shows that Lizzie has a “it is what it is” mentality when it comes to negative things. She has no desire to get to greatness or growth and she’s lost all ambition in her life and is sharing that energy among other people including her family. Her relationship with her husband is very odd and to me it seems forced like she is there because she has to fill in the wife role but she doesn’t really want to be there. There is a moment where he starts to doubt that she has a job and in her thoughts we see she goes along with his statement and talks about hypothetical scenarios where people get fired for months and pretend to go to work (pg. 81). There was also another moment when Lizzie shares her thoughts on a newly divorced friend that she found out has met someone new and says “I can only imagine what it would be like to be this age and then suddenly fall in love” which Ben corrects her and says, “You are in love” (pg. 104) ….. awkward.  These moments of uncertainty are all reflections of how she sees herself and the world.

At Lizzies age I think it is normal to feel some of the things she is going through because everyone at their middle age might have some moments of worry about their life naturally because maybe their life didn’t pan out how they thought originally. The difference with Lizzie and where it starts to become a concern is she is okay with that. She has concluded that things are just the way they are and it can’t be changed. She’s okay with the average, unfulfilling life she knows she is living because she hasn’t allowed herself to see how she can make changes that will create growth for herself because she considers her age to be too late.

After reading the second part of “Weather”, I am understanding more about what makes this book a part of the cli-fi genre. It is fairly subtle, but we, as the reader, do feel a shift in this section. 

There are a couple things going on in this section that make the reader realize what is happening. First, we have what the novel does so well: scattered thoughts. We get the astronauts and her mother and Nicola, etc. But in this section it feels much closer, much more suffocating. The thoughts we’re getting from her have a darker tinge to them. These thoughts, these moments, these jumps mirror the outside world, and how chaotic and overwhelming it is. There is a sort of unidentifiable sense of impending doom, which is really an essential piece of the cli-fi genre.

Second, in one of her blips, Lizzie tells us that she avoids “the people [she lives] with” by spending too much time on the phone with her mother. She claims this to be a part of a much larger issue of her making bad decisions and finding herself unable to stop them. Her choosing this specific example is striking to me because it shows that she is actively choosing to avoid the most important people in her life. This is due to an underlying anxiety she has about the future, which compels her to turn away from the people who know her best. 

I think this part is incredibly well done, because it feels, like the rest of the book, incredibly real. The constant shifting of Lizzie’s mind to these “doomsday” type thoughts. The constant shifting, period. The worrying and fretting over small, meaningless, things and inability to really address this feeling. It reads to me like a very real depiction of an anxious, buzzing mind. 

That being said, she does talk about Klonopin and knowing she can’t overdo her usage of drugs to the point where she can no longer use them (92). It is not like she is oblivious to the anxious feelings she is having. I think she is just trying her best to ride it out. 

“Weather” is not a novel that shouts “climate disaster” at you. Rather, it suggests these climate crisis-related themes through the speaker’s life events and internal thoughts. This novel, in my opinion, hits harder because of this subtly. There is a creeping, but very real danger. Exploring it through the way it affects the mind is a brilliant and incredibly impactful way to do it.

Lizzie’s climate anxieties are meant to intensify in part 2, but they remain frustratingly superficial, caught up in a cycle of vague worries and surface-level observations. When she considers how “nothing happens in real life the way it does in your head” after talking to Sylvia, it’s a line that could have captured her dawning sense of helplessness in the Anthropocene. Yet, instead of pushing her to confront what she fears, it’s just another thought that floats away, leaving her unease unexplored. An afterthought is Lizzie‘s anxiety about the future. She is surrounded by warnings and prophecies, yet she just scans them lightly without actively engaging in deep discussions. All this makes her worry about the world barely resembles some real fear but rather something she has adopted out of habit or duty.

Offill also introduces some darkly humorous “survival tips” that are meant to convey Lizzie’s anxiety, but they come off more as scattered lines than genuine reflections. For instance, Sylvia warns Lizzie to “learn to weave” and “keep a few chickens” to prepare for a world that’s crumbling, but Lizzie barely considers these suggestions seriously. She repeats them, but there’s no connection between these absurd preparations and her own life or family. Even when Lizzie considers the advice to “learn to shoot,” she brushes it off, making it feel like the stakes of survival and collapse are things she can playfully toss aside. There’s a disconnect between the gravity of these tips and Lizzie’s response, which leaves the reader feeling like she’s unable to confront the looming danger she senses around her.

What gets frustrating in part two is that rarely do Lizzie‘s concerns translate into real action or reflection. Even when she reads about the impending shortage of everything and tries to absorb these warnings, her mind catches it on an intellectual level but can’t work out what this shortage might mean for her family or her life. She confesses at one point, “I don‘t have what it takes to imagine it,” which feels like it should be some kind of turning point but mostly feels like a dead end. Instead, Lizzie repeatedly sidesteps any semblance of reckoning with her place in an evolving world. Part two teeters on the edge of meaningful exploration but settles into leaving Lizzie in the same passive stance, as though she‘s standing at some safe distance, watching the Anthropocene unfold.